


blossom alone over you

by microcomets



Category: Warrior Nun (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/F, Internalized Homophobia, Pining, Podfic Available, Sparring, sexuality exploration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-21
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:48:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26022169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/microcomets/pseuds/microcomets
Summary: Beatrice does not do well in the way of crushes.
Relationships: Sister Beatrice/Ava Silva
Comments: 39
Kudos: 491





	blossom alone over you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lunaerea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunaerea/gifts).



> a gift for my dear friend kristin because today is her birthday.
> 
> personal shoutout to my catholic education and my homosexuality for this one!
> 
> unbetaed we die like women
> 
> (beatrice is filipina in this fic because that’s what research led me to believe, but i understand this could be wrong and later contradicted by canon!)

Beatrice has spent most of her life with her feet rooted firmly to the ground. Well-practiced in stillness, an artform of balance.

Back when she still lived in England, in one of the smaller country towns in Berkshire — before her parents had traded the humble traces of Beatrice’s childhood for the sleek trappings of political life — her father had owned a wheezy Volkswagen that rattled across even the smoothest roads. He’d always kept a large jar of coins in the middle console, and Beatrice remembers how the coins in the jar would shake and shake and shake with the juddering of the car on the asphalt, a metallic jangling so persistent that after those trips with her father, she’d hear the whine of tinnitus in her ears for hours.

Meeting Ava feels like that. Loud. Resonant. Like so many things shaking in place.

—

They’re training. Ava’s wearing a gray tank-top patched dark with sweat, her bare shoulders gleaming with it. Beatrice pins her over and over and over again with little to no effort, but all the same, Ava gets wincing to her feet, asking for more with a lopsided smile here, a self-deprecating crack there.

“I think you’re going easy on me, Bea,” Ava teases her. She’d started calling Beatrice that far too soon after they’d met, far too soon than was appropriate by Beatrice’s sharply regulated standards. It had given her a funny, flushed feeling at first, a quick _zing_ that had resounded and hadn’t stopped, and it had taken her a few hours to realize the sensation wasn’t, in fact, unpleasant. So she allows it.

To Ava’s jab, she doesn’t respond outright; just gives her a lofted quirk of her eyebrow and sweeps her legs out from under her with the staff. Ava tumbles to the ground with a loud _smack_ on the mat, and she gives a groaned little laugh, tipping her head back into the floor.

“Okay, point taken,” she wheezes. “Jesus, Beezus. Help me up?”

“Beezus?” Beatrice repeats, skeptically, and holds her hand just out of reach.

Ava swipes for the hand and misses, flops back onto the ground with a tired exhale. “Yeah, c’mon, didn’t you ever read the Ramona books?”

“Safe to say I did not,” Beatrice says, and finally extends the hand to Ava; then she’s being yanked roughly downward and Ava is moving — _through_ her, with the halo. Beatrice gasps at the brief but overwhelming burn of it, the frenzied feeling of her molecules being temporarily rearranged —

And then there’s a foot planted between her shoulder-blades, a hard kick that sends her sprawling. When she hits the ground, she twists onto her back, but Ava already has her pinned, both of her wrists tacked hard into the mat.

“ _Ha_!” Ava crows, wild and triumphant as she leans close over Beatrice, and blinking up at her, the fight goes out of Beatrice. Her wrists slacken under Ava’s grip. There’s a slow bead of sweat sliding down the bridge of Ava’s nose, she observes. It would probably taste like seawater.

Ava blinks down at her, her breathing still ragged and her eyes wide, before she says, “Uh. Sorry. You never said I couldn’t play dirty.”

“I did not,” Beatrice agrees, and Ava offers a hand to help her to her feet, her smugness rounded down into something almost sheepish.

Beatrice can sense that some balance has shifted, some inner planetary alignment knocked off by degrees. She sweeps Ava’s legs out from under her, one more time, to banish the feeling.

“Hey!” Ava cries, then stares at Beatrice from the ground in mute betrayal.

“Just for good measure,” Beatrice says, then smirks. “Can’t have you getting cocky on me.”

A wide grin splits across Ava’s features, a ray of afternoon sunlight through a stained-glass window. Something in Beatrice twists, then clenches. 

Yes, the balance has shifted.

“Little too late for that, I think,” Ava says, then rolls to her feet. She makes a _come on_ gesture with one hand, then puts her fists up. “Okay, again.”

—

Beatrice does not do well in the way of crushes. 

The last one (the _only_ one) she can recall was a girl in a couple of her courses at school, in Year 7. She hadn’t recognized it as a crush then, just a persisting fascination with everything the girl did. Most of all, she wanted to be like her, to be her friend. To have her own company desired. 

When her parents asked for her usual reports on her school days over supper, Beatrice talked about the girl every night for a week. Her first mistake. Her second was to miss the warning signs; the subtle, calculating way that her parents had looked at each other over their meals each evening.

Two weeks later, Beatrice had been packed up without another word and shipped off elsewhere, out of sight, a Catholic boarding school in Derbyshire called St. Mary’s. It took her several confused, lonely nights in this new place to realize her error, what exactly she had done to merit punishment, and when she did, it had become another lockbox, another new state of being to absorb into her person. 

It was easier to feel nothing toward anyone at all rather than confront her own failings. Easier to deaden sensation than to grapple with that part of herself that existed beyond her understanding, but indeed had always existed, in spite of her parents’ best efforts. She was most comfortable around women, anyway, and her vocation as a nun would ensure she didn’t have to consider the idea of partnership with a man. A non-issue. The problem was neutralized.

Then, Ava. She had crashed into the Order’s tidily arranged rituals and relationship dynamics like a wrecking ball through the church roof. And, well.

That evening after training, after she strips off her robes to shower, Beatrice stares for a long time at her reflection, at the perfectly spherical burn-mark welted on her abdomen. Ava would be horrified to know the halo through her had had such an effect.

Beatrice traces one fingertip along the raised skin of the burn, hot to the touch, and feels herself smile.

—

She almost tells Ava outright. Once. When she’s reading Sister Melanie’s accounts aloud from the journal, translating the dulcet syllables of French into English. But she can barely articulate it to herself, let alone another person. Let alone Ava. She can say the word in German, but no further.

_Unbound. Unburdened. I felt, finally, myself._

Beatrice chokes as she tries to tell her. Cries, lashes out a little, reveals too much, makes a mess of her words in a way that haunts her for days. An unforgivable slip in composure. 

_What you are is beautiful_ , Ava tells her. Coming from Ava, looking at her like that — tender, like the first green shoot of spring cracking through winter-parched earth — Beatrice wants to believe it. She almost does.

—

A few nights later, Ava shows up at her dorm, tipsy and pajama-clad. 

Beatrice is in the middle of lighting the candles around her room, a nighttime ritual she had adapted some time ago that brings her a strange sense of peace. Of order, comfort.

She also just really likes matches.

She pauses at the series of rapidfire raps on her door, mostly because it’s an anomaly. Her sisters do not...turn up, at this hour, and certainly not to her.

Beatrice opens the door, and Ava smirks back at her from the other side, her lips wine-stained and her cheeks slightly flushed. She wordlessly holds up an ornate glass decanter and wags it back and forth in her hand, pointedly letting the red liquid slosh around inside it.

“Where did you get that,” Beatrice says sternly, already very much knowing the answer.

“Cruella de Jesus pissed me off earlier, so I halo’ed into the sacristy,” Ava says with a shrug. She leans one shoulder into the doorframe. “It’s like the Cask of Amontillado in there. Trust me, she won’t notice it’s missing.”

Beatrice sighs. “I won’t partake, nor do I condone, but I also won’t snitch.”

Ava’s face lights up, and she tilts forward to pat a fond hand on Beatrice’s cheek. The skin in the wake of her touch burns like the tail of a comet. Beatrice has never been touched like this, so casual and coy.

“That’s my girl,” Ava says, then stumbles into her room. A presence of color against a backdrop of monochrome. “Uh, _wow_. This is so...”

“Bleak?” Beatrice supplies, closing the door behind them. “Depressing? Appropriately nun-like?”

“I was going to say impressive.” Ava’s voice pitches up into her next question as she turns to look at Beatrice over her shoulder. “Do you _dust_ _regularly_?”

“No,” Beatrice says. She pauses, then admits, “Yes.”

“That’s so cute,” Ava croons. She wanders over to the made bed, the stiff gray comforter stretched taut over the mattress, then tumbles backward onto it, careful to keep the wine from sloshing over. “ _Oof._ This feels like a coffin, what the fresh hell?”

“Didn’t they tell you?” Beatrice asks, and lights a few more candles around the room. “Becoming a creature of the night is the next step of the Order, after the warrior and the nun bits.”

“Shucks, I missed that during the orientation,” Ava says dryly, and unstoppers the wine. Beatrice shakes out the match and watches Ava, splayed out on her bed, through the rising curl of smoke.

“Although Mother Superion does look at me like she wants to slurp my blood like a Baja Blast,” Ava continues, consideringly, and craning her head up, she takes two deep swigs out of the decanter. The cordons of her neck stand out in sharp relief, her throat working as she swallows. 

Beatrice glances away.

Ava sits up, pats the space next to her. “Come sit, c’mon. I don’t want to put you out in your own place.”

“You’re not,” Beatrice replies. Her palms are starting to sweat. She crosses to her anyway and sits next to Ava on the bed, cross-legged. (A carefully gauged distance so their knees don’t touch.)

Ava seems to ignore this consideration. She wriggles closer into Beatrice’s space, as eager as a Golden retriever.

“Do you really not drink?” Ava asks. Too close. She smells like berry, the fruity cloy of her shampoo and something headier, like blackberry, from the waft of the red wine. “I thought that kind of like, came with the territory. You know, save your body for Jesus, but at least you can go ham on the booze as a consolation prize.”

“I wasn’t aware you had such a firm grasp of the Beatitudes,” Beatrice says, and Ava tilts her head back and laughs to the ceiling, a genuine burst from her chest.

“That should be your nickname,” Ava says a moment later, the corners of her eyes warm with mirth. “Beatitude. Beatrice, with the attitude.”

“Do _not,_ ” Beatrice warns, and gives her arm a shove. Strange; she doesn’t usually do that, touch people so roughly even in play, but Ava grins and makes a show of rocking into it. “Beezus is bad enough.”

“Noooo, you love it,” Ava teases. “Come on, you do, just a little.”

Beatrice steadily ignores that, as well as the slow heat creeping up her neck. She refrains from responding directly to it.

“And to answer your question, yes, I’m permitted to drink,” Beatrice tells her instead. “I just choose not to. It’s what they call a pardonable sin _._ ”

Ava takes another long drink. “I see,” she says solemnly, then hiccups. “And what, dear Sister, would be considered an _un_ pardonable sin?”

Beatrice stares at her. Ava’s lips are wine-red, a slight purpling of her teeth. Her dark eyes are hazy with liquor, a long sweep of her lashes.

 _The wanting,_ she almost says. _The wanting is._

“Lots of things,” is what Beatrice’s mouth supplies instead. Her gaze drops pointedly to the decanter in Ava’s hand, dangled over her knee. “Theft from the church, for one.”

“Booooo,” Ava complains, drawing out the syllable as she flops backward onto the bed again. “You can absolve my soul and stuff, right? Forgive me, sister, for I have sinned?”

“Not my jurisdiction.”

“Please?” Ava asks, a near-whine, and Beatrice sighs, reaches over, and gently taps the middle of Ava’s forehead. More hesitantly, to the center of her chest, where her breastbone sits. Then one tap to either shoulder, left then right.

“There,” she says. She sounds unsteady, even to herself. Ava is watching her closely. “Now you’re marked for Jesus.”

“That’s all I’ve ever wanted,” Ava replies, somehow managing to sound sarcastic and dreamy at the same time, and she closes her eyes. She doesn’t open them for a long time. Her hand goes slack around the decanter, so loose that Beatrice gently plucks it out of her grasp as Ava’s breathing staggers and slows. Her knees are still dangling off the edge of the mattress, her worn sleep-shirt ridden up just over her hips, her dirt-gray shoelaces untied and brushing the floor. The shirt looks too big for her and vaguely familiar; maybe one of Shannon’s.

Beatrice pulls her knees up to her chin and rests it there. She watches, and wants. 

—

Over the years, Beatrice has morphed herself into many shapes, each a box to neatly check off. 

A martial artist trained in Arnis, from an early age; she’d earned her black belt in judo at ten, taekwondo at twelve. 

A multi-linguist; English and Tagalog spoken at home, then she had started with Latin and worked her way down its roots, through French and Spanish and Italian. Then outward, to Russian and Mandarin, snatches of German and Arabic. 

A trained pianist, starting with lessons from age three; she’d learned the organ and played masses once she’d gotten to St. Mary’s. 

A perfect student. A soft-spoken daughter. An honorable granddaughter.

A strategic optic for her parents’ careers.

A warrior, a trained and able body to be thrown at hellish creatures on the front lines. A chess piece in a much larger cosmic game, a rook. A knight. A pawn.

The more Beatrice added over the years, the more worthy she was. The more space she deserved to claim.

Everyone she had met thus far in life had intersected with one of these states of being. Her parents had needed her multi-talent as a boastful claim. The Order needs her fighting capabilities and her languages, along with the useful qualities she can lend: Mary needs her backup, Lilith her level-headedness, Camila her reassuring calm. Shannon had needed her as a mediator. Mother Superion needs her steady hand to guide the other girls. (And sometimes her organ-playing.)

Ava doesn’t need anything from Beatrice. She doesn’t even think to ask. With Ava, Beatrice forgets her scripts; forgets they exist at all. With Ava, she just is.

—

Beatrice rarely checks her phone. She really has no need to; it’s not like anyone is texting her. Once or twice a week, she uses her small data plan to track the news, to check in on which corner of the world is miserable or crumbling or despairing. The walls of Cat’s Cradle are insular to a fault, and most of the nuns are practically Luddites, so they don’t get a lot of updates from the outside world here. Occasionally, there’s an email from one of her parents; detached in tone, perfunctory. Checking to make sure she’s alive and, more importantly, keeping boxes checked.

Today, as Beatrice scrolls through her feed for bite-sized news updates, she spots a tweet from BBC News. The headline settles in her mouth with a physical weight, sour to the taste. A bitter burn in her throat. 

Her thumb hovers, then clicks.

_Far-Right Faction Pushes Conversion Therapy Bill, Faces Parliamentary Backlash_

by Jada Finch

A group of Conservative MPs in the House of Commons is facing criticism for endorsing a controversial bill that would promote conversion therapy for LGBTQ youth in the United Kingdom. 

On Tuesday, a small Conservative faction presented its private backbench bill to Parliament for the first time, which is scheduled for a second reading later this year. It is the latest of the group’s legislative attempts targeted at the LGBTQ community in the UK.

This call to expand gay conversion therapy has been dismissed largely as a fringe view even within Parliament’s conservative circles; [Prime Minister Boris Johnson himself has pledged to ban gay conversion therapy in the United Kingdom](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-53477323), though measures for this promise have yet to be presented.

“It doesn’t have the parliamentary support to gain any traction,” said Labour peer Dana Gilligan, MP of the House of Commons. “But the fact that it’s even been suggested and has received support at all is, frankly, disappointing.”

Among the bill’s most vocal supporters are House of Commons MPs Bill Dyson, Samantha Harris, and Gabriel and Esther Villegas.

Beatrice shouldn’t be surprised to see her parents’ names; they’ve made their viewpoints clear enough. St. Mary’s had been a mercy, compared to the alternative. St. Mary’s had been locking the problem in an attic, out of sight and mind. A skeleton kicked into a closet, shattered china swept under a rug. This would have been worse. It could have been worse.

She finds her hands can’t stop shaking. She needs to just — _close_ the article, shut her phone down, possibly chuck it into the nearest river, but she can’t stop reading her parents’ names over and over, stuck on that surname they share.

“Beatrice?” Ava’s voice floats into her awareness, quiet with concern. Beatrice snaps her phone down to her side, clamps a hand to her mouth. She doesn’t know when she’d started crying, but she can feel the wet tracks along her cheeks, the bridge of her nose.

Beatrice drops into a crouch, her back sliding along the wall. She keeps her hands sealed to her mouth, as if she can physically stuff the hitched, sobbing sounds back down her throat. Ava follows her down, her hands loosely curling around Beatrice’s wrists.

“Hey,” Ava says, hushed, soothing. “Beatrice, talk to me. What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Beatrice says, too bitterly — bitter that she’s crying in front of Ava, yet again, over something she’s already known for years. The article shouldn’t have taken her off-guard; it’s nothing new. Nothing really surprising, even. She finds she cannot stop crying.

“Okay, well, your tears say it’s _something_ ,” Ava says, the typical whip of her humor gentled. She waits a moment, just staring at Beatrice, before she asks, more tentatively, “Do you...wanna talk about it?”

Beatrice _can’t_ talk about it, really. For reasons other than the soundless crying. She unlocks her phone and hands it to Ava without a word, letting her read the article for herself.

“Oh,” Ava says after a moment. She takes an additional moment to reread, as though making sure she’s understood. “They’re your…?”

Beatrice nods once.

“And you…?”

Another nod, slower, more hesitant. No less bitter.

“Fuck them,” Ava says, at once righteous and shimmering. Like the halo’s glow. She locks the phone and drops it to her jean-leg. “Seriously, Beatrice, fuck them.”

It’s so simple and decided when Ava says it. Beatrice wishes she could siphon some of that anger for herself, use it to dry out the wells of hurt that run so deep. Anger would be easier, cleaner.

“I knew,” Beatrice says, and sniffles. It’s a gross sound — she must look pathetic, she thinks. Everything is humiliating, curled up in a corner of the armory with her knees pulled to her chest like a frightened child. Her voice is still thick with tears. “I already _knew_ , so I don’t know why it — caught me like this.”

Ava rubs a hand up and down her arm, just letting her talk, her eyebrows curved with sympathy. Beatrice doesn’t touch others often, so the rhythmic glide of it is as soothing as it is striking, like the prickle of static electricity.

“I’m sorry,” Beatrice mutters a moment later, when she can finally speak in a collected way. She wipes at her eyes with her sleeve.

“Oh, don’t apologize to _me_ ,” Ava replies with good humor. Light enough for levity, gentle enough to avoid trivializing; a natural balance. She squeezes Beatrice’s forearm. “You let me sob in your arms over _my_ fucked-up history stuff. This can be like, our thing now.”

It startles a wobbly laugh out of Beatrice. She wouldn’t have thought it possible. But, of course, Ava.

“It’s just…” Beatrice trails off, hunting for the right words. “Knowing it in theory is one thing. Seeing it written in ink, for the world to see, that they think I’m — wrong, that they want me — fundamentally changed, it’s —”

“Hey,” Ava says, and two hands come up, suddenly, to anchor on either side of Beatrice’s jaw. “Look at me.”

Beatrice does look. Despite her best efforts not to. She’s always very careful not to look at other women any longer than is absolutely necessary — _1-2-3_ then a respectful glance away, and repeat for however long is necessary. But Ava has her wired in place here, her grip forceful and intent and her eyes a gravitational center, and Beatrice — _can’t_ look away. Her breath is gone, lost somewhere in the back of her throat. She can feel her pulse adrenaline-high, kicking against Ava’s hands, throbbing in her mouth.

Ava’s eyes flicker over hers, her lips parted. A bonfire gaze, burning with secondhand anger, with passion and compassion in equal measure, and then her tongue darts out to wet her lips, and just as quickly, before Beatrice can blink, Ava kisses her — firm with conviction, a little forceful. Very warm. Beatrice’s mouth parts on a gasp, and the kiss softens, lingers — it hesitates, the lightest nip on her lower lip, and then Ava pulls back from her, her eyes wide. A pinked glow along the apples of her cheeks.

Beatrice stares at her, open-mouthed. Shaken into complete speechlessness.

“Tell me that was wrong,” Ava says quietly. Again, that rock-steady surety, but her eyes soft, near-fond. Her lips, heart-shaped, curve up in a small smile. Her hands haven’t left Beatrice’s face.

“No,” Beatrice hears herself whisper. Tentatively, like something slow in bloom, she smiles back. “It felt right.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[PODFIC] Blossom Alone Over You](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26781127) by [AudioFrickBooks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AudioFrickBooks/pseuds/AudioFrickBooks)




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